Day seven marked the completion of work in the initial areas for both teams. On the east side of the dig, the team exposed the line of Cardo 4N in order to bet the back side of W1298. Just some cleaning remains.
On the north side of the excavation, the team finished its first assigned area and will move west tomorrow.
At dawn on the first day of the week, the Concordia team was already at work.
I wonder if anyone thought of the significance, as the sun rose.
We finished work on the eastern storage room. While doing so, Dr. Chambers recovered an oil lamp,
and Emily found a coin during the sifting process.
The next model we will post from this area will be the final clean model.
On the north side of the dig, the team is approaching the floor. They continue to recover many mosaic clusters from the collapsed upper floor. But the clusters are so fragmentary that they only hint at what was above.
As we have attempted to interpret the material remains from the northeast insula, we have relied on small finds, architecture, inter-connectivity of structures, and inscriptions. What we have lacked is an inscription from the church complex to help us in our understanding. Is the complex a monastery? Who is the elderly woman in the revered tomb?
This week while working on the northerly building, we began to recover clusters of tesserae that apparently were part of the mosaic floor on an upper level of the building. The clusters are relatively small but quite tantalizing.
This cluster has a finely formed epsilon followed by a space and then the beginning of a lambda or an upsilon.
I am making a bit of a guess on this one, but I think it may be a theta.
A line begins with an epsilon. The next line begins with a tau. I assume that the black line to the left is a border.
I am more confident that this letter is a theta. But I could be wrong.
Another guess . . . the bottom portion of an omega, or the top of an upsilon, if flipped over.
We have some additional pieces with colors and hope to recover more tomorrow. Alphabet soup, anyone?
The Concordia team finished the first week of the 2016 season have made excellent progress in both the eastern and northern zones. In the east, the team almost completed the storage room next to the eastern wall of the House of Tyche. Careful work led to the recovery of two coins (so far) near the floor.
In the northern zone, we can now say that the first floor of the north building had a stone floor. However, we are recovering many mosaic clusters from about thirty cm above the floor, suggesting a collapse of a mosaic from a second floor.
In DR40 we again made excellent progress. By the end of the day, we began to remove the last twenty centimeters above the floor. We should finish the room tomorrow. We will then open a section of the street to the east of the House of Tyche.
In DP 44 and DP 45, we are still 30 centimeters or more above the floor level. But the recovery of several clusters of mosaic cubes suggests that the room may have had a mosaic floor. If so, we hope that significant portions may be intact.
We end with a picture of Emily from today. She recovered several nails and clusters of broken pottery, mostly Beisan jars.
